Lots of things have changed the game before this and there will be other game changers in the future.
BTW fracking isn't new. It's old. It's the combination of fracking and directional drilling that have boosted production in recent years.
all straight forward drilling and pumping from standard deposits No, for example, enhanced recovery involves pumping water, steam, natural gas, CO2, surfactants etc into a formation to push more oil out. That's not "straight forward drilling and pumping."
How old is fracking? About as old as the oil industry:
Shooting the well: The petroleum torpedoes of the early oil fields
By Alexis Madrigal on 24 Aug 2013
Before the fracked gas boom of the last 10 years, before the rise of mega oil companies, before the entire 20th century, actually, humans figured out how to increase the flow of fossil fuels from a well. It was simple: Take an iron container about the size of a large thermos, stick some black powder or other explosives into it, stick a blasting cap on it, send it down the well, and then send a weight down to detonate it. BOOM. They called this, “Shooting the well!” And I believe the “!” is required, as in Yahoo!
The process was first commercialized by Colonel E.A.L. Roberts in 1865, a veteran of the Civil War, and he soon formed the The Roberts Petroleum Torpedo Company. But his success spawned a host of imitators, and the whole thing devolved into a patent brawl out there in eastern Pennsylvania near Titusville in the region that was once known as Petrolia. (I told this story in my book on the history of green technology because … well, I think because who can resist petroleum torpedoes?)
Reports in the paper of record, The Titusville Morning Herald, regularly discussed the wonders of the torpedoes as in this snippet from July 2, 1866:
A gentleman who has just called on us from Tarr farm, tells us that an experiment was made on the 21st, with one of Roberts’ Torpedoes in the ‘Bakery Well’ which has formerly pumped from 7 to 8 barrels per day. The production has continually increased. On the 27th it produced 60 barrels and yesterday the production was 100 barrels. We wonder how the owners feel at the great difference in their balance sheet! To increase a production 1200 per cent in a week is no small gain. The ‘Hayes well’, Petroleum Centre, was ‘fired Off’ last Saturday the 13th, and it has greatly improved. The exact figures we have not got. The Roberts’ Torpedo must scatter the paraffines or break things generally.
Break things generally, indeed. The science doesn’t seem too complex. Break apart the rocks underground and it’s easier for the petroleum to flow through the seams.
What’s amazing is that the process, which is a distant ancestor of today’s hydraulic fracturing techniques, was created just a few years after the first American oil wells of the 1850s. That is to say: Almost immediately after we started drilling wells, we started fracturing the rocks underground to increase the flow of fossil fuels.
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grist.org
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/08/shooting-the-well-the-petroleum-torpedoes-of-the-early-oil-fields/278901/
“FIRE IN THE HOLE!” yelled our host, his hands cupped to his mouth. We were deep in the midst of uninhabited woodlands, several miles from the nearest structure, so the shout was meant for no one in particular. But it is as much tradition as it is the law of Pennsylvania to give a clear and distinct audible warning of what was about to occur. And what was about to occur was also part of an old oil field tradition, dating back to the earliest days of the industry, in the 1860s, called “shooting a well.”
Our host turned around and faced the other direction, again yelling, “Fire in the hole!” His voice trailed off into the endless vista of oak and maple and black cherry tree trunks, mostly barren of leaves by the middle of this chilly, but very sunny and bright November day. Then, our host smiled (we were all smiling) and stepped over to the blasting machine that was sitting on some 6-by-6-inch pieces of lumber at the edge of a corrugated steel lean-to.
“Everybody get ready to move under cover in case any fly-rock comes out,” said the blaster, Richard Tallini, a licensed explosives expert who has been setting off high-energy charges since 1967. That is, if any rock or other debris came shooting up and out of that hole, we were all supposed to dive for cover under the corrugated steel structure. ...........
Had ignition occurred at the surface of the Earth, the resultant release of energy would have knocked down just about everything for 100 yards and put out enough heat to set the woods on fire for a good long distance. A surface explosion like that to which we were party would have dug a 15-foot crater, raised a mushroom cloud that would have been visible two counties over, and been heard by listeners 30 miles away. But this particular release of energy was contained deep within the confines of an 8-inch hole, an oil well drilled many years ago into the Devonian age sands of northwest Pennsylvania.
We heard something like a low rumble come from the well. But there was no fly-rock. Nobody had to dive for the deck. Within seconds, the air above the well was disturbed by the heat energy that escaped from the top of the hole, distorting the light that passed through. Then there were some wisps of smoke that exited the hole, and as we walked close to the well, we could smell the odor of natural gas and burnt carbon and char. We had this feeling that we had somehow changed the world, but we had yet to discover by how much, or perhaps by how little.
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The 8-foot-long charge, lowered on a wire to a precise depth near the bottom of the hole, was underneath about 100 feet of water column. The water came into the hole courtesy of the natural seepage from the sides of the well, into the open bore beneath the steel casing. This water column also served to contain much of the energy from the propellant at the bottom of the well bore, instead of allowing the energy to explode upward, like what happens when a bullet is fired from a long gun barrel. Ideally, you want to keep your energy down in the hole, where it can do you some good.
The idea is to channel that rocket fuel energy, via hydraulic shock, for as long as possible (milliseconds, really, but that is the physics of shock waves) against as much as possible of the oil-bearing sandstone. At depth in the well, the hydraulic shock wave travels at ultra-high speed (much over 10,000 feet per second) through the mixture of oil and water that permeates the rock, and also channels through the fractures in the rock. Most of the transmitted energy is mechanical, in the form of the shock wave front. The wave front pushes through the fractures and opens and expands new fractures.
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Some of the energy that you release is also transformed by heating the down-hole fluids, leading to vapor expansion opening up the fracture systems via the effects of superheated steam. The bottom line is that you want to maximize the one-time pulse of the energy release and place that pulse against the maximum amount of surface area. Get it? There is, of course, a method to this madness.
Many years ago, when this particular oil well was first drilled by the Quaker State Oil Co., the geologists and engineers took the time and went to the expense of fracturing the oil-bearing sands with a high-pressure water charge. It is called, in the industry, “hydro-frac’ing.” That is shorthand for “hydrological fracturing.”
To make a long story short, hydro-frac’ing involves getting a couple of big pumper trucks out on the well site and pressurizing water down your hole in the ground. The pressurized water works its way into the natural zones of weakness that are present in every sedimentary rock, particularly those of the second sand in these Devonian formations. In the case of this particular well, the idea was to fracture the oil-bearing sands with high water pressure early in the life of the well, and thus increase the surface area of sand that could drain oil into the well bore. It was and is a well-known technique to increase the short-term recovery of the Pennsylvania-grade crude oil contained within.
Yes, indeed, it worked. This particular oil well was a good producer for Quaker State for many years. The oil was consistently able to seep out of the exposed rock surfaces that were fractured at depth. The oil then migrated, both by gravity and through the hydraulic assistance of natural water flow, along the fractures (mostly microscopic cracks, really) and into the well bore. Once in the well bore, the oil could be pumped to the surface and collected via a system of gathering pipelines.
But eventually, the oil production from this particular well, and from its neighboring wells, declined to a point where Quaker State sold everything off. Quaker State could not be bothered with wells that were producing only a few barrels of oil per day, let alone a few barrels of oil per month. So other operators purchased the lease rights to the oil field containing this well, and all of the nearby wells.
This well, the one we were “shooting,” and many others similar to it, passed to operators who were and are willing to invest the time and labor (and it takes a lot of labor, I assure you) to coax whatever oil is left into the well bores. The well shot that we witnessed was an attempt to put new energy down and through the old fracture systems, and thereby enhance the oil production.
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What we were witnessing the other day in the woods south of Titusville was a new kind of well shot that is a vast improvement over the old and dangerous manner of stimulating a well by exploding liquid nitroglycerin. It also is an improvement over using other, but safer, forms of high explosives. Nitroglycerin and other high explosives tend to shatter the rock, and in many instances cause the well to plug up with large amounts of debris, instead of increasing production.
But by utilizing modified rocket propellant, the down-hole energy and velocity characteristics are quite different from those of high explosives. That is, there are fewer tendencies to shatter the rock formation, and an increased likelihood of expanding an existing fracture system, thus increasing the surface area from which the oil can drain from the oil-bearing strata and into the well.
Did the shot that we witnessed really work? It takes awhile to know for sure, because the operator has to clean out the explosive debris from the well (there is always some debris), reinstall the down-hole tubing and pumping equipment, and then track production over a period of time. But past well shots of this type have increased oil production by as much as a factor of 10, at least for a period of weeks and months. The business rationale for “shooting a well” is that a properly executed shot will pay for itself in the short term, and coax some oil out of the ground that otherwise never would have seen the light of day.
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dailyreckoning.com
More: aoghs.org |
